I'd probably avoid using DB unless it was to buy some time for a heal (with the added disorient effect). It has a horribly narrow cone and you'll hit less mobs than you hit with AE.

If we're talking about mobs being tanked by a protection paladin - I'm very confident you can hit every mob every time with a drangon's breath. The cone is in fact much larger than you might think, or rather It's longer than you think and you merely have to use the range to achieve the breadth.

Long post.

Perhaps I over emphasized the AOE portion of the idea. I understand you hit gcd, but with IV you still come short of GCD, I also didn't mention that the procs would probably be back to back instead of on top of one another, also that the procs would be coold down as you have rest time between trash waves.

The idea of dual procs that if you get enough haste you wouldn't need to AB and could AM instead. Your AM would do well over AB in terms of both damage and mana cost at 600 haste. If you double proc and get a below GCD AB, you will in fact loose some of the proc time from sub GCD AB, but since the procs would be stacked you could squeeze more out of them. The proc time is 6 second, ergo the more spells you cast in that timer period the more powerful the proc is. With that much haste you should be able to AM twice within the proc period, even if you cast one AB during the initial proc. Hasting can not make your prime nuke more effective mana wise, which is why +damage normally wins out. But if you can make your secondary spell do as much damage as AB while costing a lot less mana. My experience from when I did have MSD/Quag/Blade Wizardry was that all 3 procs together was rare, but two procs together happened often. Going by a rule of synergy, one proc in and of itself is weak, but two stacked together are a great deal stronger then one by itself, perhaps 3 times. 3 procs together could potentialy be 5-6 times as strong. If you got lucky and say had a 600 hasted AM for and managed to spam it 2 times, and then pulled another two AMs at 900 haste you'd do an insane amount of damage. Again this is given a luck factor, but risk vs benefits, if you can make the potential benefits out weigh the risk it's worth trying for.

If I delve a little further into the science. You can throw 4 AB in 6 seconds. With a 320 spell haste proc you can do 5 ABs in almost the same time, and then throw out an AM at 4 seconds cast time. Where the benefit comes in is that you are throwing in an extra AB in the same time period (where your extra damage comes from), and the switching to AM. The AM reduced mana cost makes up for the cost of the extra AB, but with a 300 haste rating your AM comes close to AB in damage output, added to the the chance of procing another haste effect if only one had proced as of that AM. Putting you in 5SR for 2 or so seconds you make up an extra 100 or so mana in regen, thus even further compounding the cost benafits of an AM over AB. If you can pull off a free AB every minute (and loose only a smaller portion via AM), you'd come out with an extra 1500-2000 damage per minute. With say Hex Head, if you strait AB spam for 20 seconds on the use ability (given AB/IV was down), you could squeeze about 2500 damage out of it and do it once every 2 minutes. If you could only squeeze just 1500 free damage from eye of quag via 5 hasted ABs followed by 1 hasted AM, you can still do it once every minute instead of once every two minutes. Also on procs, hasting allows you to squeeze more out of other procs like say Hyjal Band. One free AB would be an extra 90ish damage, hex/icon do nothing in that regard.

For clear casting, I wouldn't switch to AM just for the clearcast, it would be nice if you did clearcast. Here is the idea of the hasting procs, with 3 of them you triple your chance of lucking out on an AM/CC when you AM at proc end. Also the luck factor, if you just by sheer chance CC while AMing at 600-900 haste, you get a decent chunk of burst damage.

As far as sub-optimal gear / specs.
Spec wise the idea is to make AM more effective so that you don't have to be deep frost for Frostbolting. Although unlikley, if you could make AM effective enough you'd only loose Cold Snap and not Frostbolt.

Gear wise one would be via weapon swapping just to obtain the proc then swapping back. If you could squeeze 1500 or more damage out of one free AB and then swap back, you can potentially come out ahead of sub Sunwell gear depending on how many ABs you had to spam to get the proc. If you lost 200 damage from a gear swap, you'd need to cast about 8 ABs outside of the proc before you started lossing out, if it proced on your 12th AB you'd not be to bad off. One is also via meta socket, so you give up 3% crit damage for a possible free AB every minute. The hasting proc has a value of 6 seconds, if you can squeeze 9-10 seconds out of that proc you double the effectiveness of it. Even looking at a blue item like Eye of Quag, can you imagine doubling the damage from any number of comparable blue items that say gave +130 damage on use? Even so I would probably switch out eye of Quag for anything Illidan/Sunwell quality, but the meta could easily be kept up to date, and I do believe if used properly Quag could be competitive with Hex Head, and certainly defeat Icon just because it procs once every minute vs every 2 minutes.

Vs epic trinkets, the problem I have with say Hex or Icon is 2 min timer stacked with a 3 min AP/IV, you either need to save one or use them all seperatly. With an eye of quag you can make an attempt to line up the proc to happen once during every AP/IV and twice outside of AP/IV. My basic conept I have is something like this, you strait AB spam untill you get the procs, then you switch to your mana efficient spam during cooldown for say 30 seconds. Come time for the proc you start your AB spam again. With a 45seond internal CD on certain items, you could get in theory 3 procs outside of AB/IV and one during AB/IV.

Vs Forstbolt. Some issues I had with Frost bolt are Improved Frostbolt, while it does increase your DPS without your DPMana, it does increase your Mana per Second consumption, as does partial AB stacking beyond the first stack.

I had toyed with the idea of leaving Frostbolt at 3 seconds and never stacking AB past the first proc during a down phase, and also down ranking Frost Bolt. Then equiping say the Zul'Aman staff with an INT enchant, and focusing more so on putting myself in a mana surplus rather then mana efficianct DPS till a pot came up. The problem I have with AB/FB/AB/AB/FB x3 is that to be optimal, you have to really be picky on your timing. With a strait FB/FB/FB/AB spam my DPS may not be as great, but dropping the AB buff doesn't hurt you nearly as much. Even if you get a 1.5 second AB at 220 mana, you are still almost doubling your Mana per second via AB over the inital cast time of 2.5 seconds.

Also Frostbolt require CoE. CoS is almost certain given you'll have a shadow priest, and you can dump the hit needed by Frostbolt.

no shit long post.

Tell ya what, please instead of posting an UTTER mess of a post that really is nothing more then a random mindfart, take a little time and actually DO SOME MATH before posting such a pile of complete horseshit.

First off AM sucks, it was good at one time and one time only and the only way for it not to suck is for them to either remove the cooldown on the Mystical Skyfire or for WoLK to change some other things.

Your theory seems based on changing spells based on procs but have you taken into account that if you change the spell order due to a proc you have just cost yourself a significant amount of dps due to the natural latency between server and client and not being able to take advantage of the spell "queueing" mechanic currently in place. So your idea was Flawed even before we started looking at the other components, and what components they are....

Blade of Wizardry?? Are you serious??? So you want me to dump 100 spell damage, 17 hit and 24 crit and also lose 330 mana every ~45 seconds to wait for a proc that lasts for 6 seconds?

Have you even compared the amount of dps you lose from trading out a Chaotic Skyfire Meta for a Mystical? Not even bringing up the loss of dps associated with meeting it's gem requirements.

I admire your persistance but please take a moment and actually do some work before posting things that just clutter up the thread with pure gibberish. At the very least go and spend a few hours with Dr Boom so you can bring real numbers to quantify your misconceptions. Last I checked the test server was open so it won't even cost you real gold to respec/regem for some simple testing.

How about, rather than waxing on in text about how your wacky and amazingly undervalued idea works you post some TC, simulation, spreadsheet, WWS log or even a screenie of Omen, rather than "by my experience two procs are quite frequent" and "ergo AM is better".

If you're deep fire and you know how to point your character towards the mobs, DB is the highest damage aoe you have. Mine usually does a total of 11-12k damage while BW only does about 9-10k (depending on crits for both).

Back to the rolling ignite discussion, I have been able to somewhat inconsistently produce rolling ignites at 2.07 and 2.11 seconds of fireball casting. This means I can (if things are timed well) be at 72 passive haste, gain IV, skull and drums to reach 2.07 for 20 seconds, and then immediately roll into 40 seconds of hero + drums at a 2.11 second cast. So if all goes well thats 60 seconds of potential rolling ignite time. It seems in longer strings of crits that it randomly changes back and fourth from the free ignite tick to the stacking ignite (with damage being either subtracted or not dealt). Hits and resists typically lose half of the ignite stack. Note: as the ignite stack increases (due to lack of ignite dmg being dealt) when and if the free ignite roll tick happens it can be rather large. I think I got one for upwards of 8k today on brutalus(under 20%, and im not sure if it was a roll or a stack I neglected to check before zoneing, wws should tell when its posted.).

Given all that I refer back to:

I plan on testing more in raid, but was wondering if any of the people here who seem to know what the hell they are doing with math had been able to TC up an answer. Does the potential of free ignite damage outweigh normal cooldown stacking, or is this all just wishful thinking.

Speaking of being good with math, has it been TCed out what values of haste result in an extra fireball during cooldowns? This seems like a rather important piece of information? There should be one low-ish value, and a second super high value? This strikes me as relevant, because if you are near said value of haste, and can regem to get that value, you'll be neat!

Edit two: math with haste is silly this late at night, my math was awful >.< I'd promise to come back later with better, but I suspect math with haste is hard during the day too :P

Going back to an old post, from the post 2.3 TC thread, moving it here.
As you said at the start of the post, in a 6 minute fight, you can use your 3m cooldowns twice and 2m ones three times.

You ideally want to wait until the last 20% to pop both 3m ones and 2m ones. Assuming the last 20% is 15% of those 6 minutes, you come up with 54 seconds. Pop all CDs at 1:00, 2m ones at 3:00, then all of them at 5:10. You won't desync your CDs if you use [Item not found!], since you have the buff from braid on your 3m CDs anyway. You can use [Flowing Flamewrath Cape]s on the first CD stacking, then mana gem or flame cap on the last one (I'd even go as far as saying mana gems would be better, if you're stacking icy veins, bloodlust, another trinket and drums for the 15 seconds you have the braid buff up, but this is just a hunch and irrelevant for my point :-) ). Using flame caps after a mana gem would be stupid, since you wouldn't be stacking it with icy veins, so if you start with a mana gem you have to go mana gem, mana gem, mana gem or flame cap, and if you start with a flame cap, you have to go flame cap, mana gem or flame cap. It gets tricky and I'm too lazy to do the math, but it basically means one flame cap is actually worth two mana gems and then you're free to pick whichever you want, but which is better depends on what trinkets you stack it (if possible, i.e. not [Darkmoon Card: Crusade]) with.

Edit: [The Skull of Gul'dan] would be a better choice to stack the braid buff with (without Icy Veins, BL/Heroism) since it increases its effectiveness, and you want [Drums of Panic] stacked with your other trinket as well (be it +spell damage or +spell haste) since they have the same CD.

Is there something I'm missing? (aside the actual math, but what I was getting at was that it doesn't desync CDs and it's not an mp5/dmg loss)

You are correct in that peaks exist in the haste scale in relation to icey veins.

You can start a 9th hasted fireball at ~ 1 haste (assuming absolutely 0 fireball latency)
10th at ~198 haste
11th at ~ 395 haste
12th at ~ 592 haste
13th at ~ 789 haste

IV+lust, (dealing only with the collision of the two as lust as a whole incorporates scorching)
at 0 haste you have 11 fireballs using said haste buffs
12th at ~ 92 haste
13th at ~244 haste
14th at ~ 395 haste
15th at ~ 547 haste
16th at ~ 699 haste

Keep in mind the peaks are small (20% haste on one fireball every 3 minutes for hitting a "breakpoint") it is worth consideration if you are close to one of the breakpoints. Even with a g15 macro I would tend to add ~ 15-20 haste to all of those values due to slight variance in casting.

I tested this on Dr Boom with ~30% crit rate and got extra damage in roughly half of my 8 trials of about 50 casts each. The best case showed ignite damage at 60% of crit damage, but generally it was more like 45-50% on the trials which had extra damage. So I feel confident to that this combination works, but the DPS boost is not nearly enough to make up for the heavy use of Scorch.

Clearly a case of Blizzard catering to casuals.

I'll quote Gurgthock in response.

That was clearly a sarcastic comment on my par.

I'm having trouble reproducing my dr boom ignite rolls in raid. Its somehow even more inconsistent, specifically looking at the end of the fight: wws
where I stacked me a nice 8.7k ignite tick (which I feel should have rolled more than it did, though i think I got an extra 3k dmg somewhere). The probable reason for lack of rollage? My fireballs were varying by up to .1 second slow(somewhat expected) and .2 seconds fast (not so expected). How exactly am I casting 1.8 second fireballs when my tool tip says i should be casting 2.07?

Depending on your role in M'uru it's a nice boost to Arcane specs since stacking scorch on blood elves for 6-7min sucks.

Can anyone confirm whether or not 3/3 Elemental Precision still grants %6 hit to Frostbolt?

It does, so the hit cap for frost mages is still only 126 rating.

They are and we love them [Blizzard] for it

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Comparison hardly supporting my comical aside - created by using my wws results, and a random alliance guild that come up when I searched for Archimonde kill wws'.

Fire mage in sickeningly better gear than me; 275k damage, 1.2k dps (Inc. heroism and drums)
Wow Web Stats

Arc/Frost mage in 1xT4,2xT5,1xT6 [Me] on Archimonde on our guild's first ever downing : 440k damage, 1.2k dps
Wow Web Stats (No heroism, no drums)

I can only assume that my insanely lucky crit %age of 38% on frostbolts ; with 0 misses (how i'll never know... I usually run at around 3-7% real world miss rate with the short fights in BT/MH) meant that I had a "lucky day at the office".

But this is just me hoping for a cookie.

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Imo frostbolt crits in PvE are slightly overpowered; but much like a pom-pyro back in the day, or a double proc of MSD hasted AMs with arcane power the day after that day... The day will come when its served it usefulness and is again redundant. It is balanced by slightly low hit, and a non talented crit %age.


Aside #2 :
Also ; does anyone have any screenshots of fire specs doing over 5k average dps (even for a short period of time ; maybe averaged of 100-200k total damage early into a fight on trash or something?) ... I've got some 5777 average dps ones as arcane and I wondered if you fire girlies could compare with all yer Sunwell loots. Oh what's that? You can't because of threat... ohhh right ok. So you use non-talented AE and hope? Ohh right.... /endtaunt

Edit - My layout messed with my mojo.

Jammi, was there any point to that post?

Trash DPS doesn't matter. Fire specs might surpass 5k DPS with cooldown stacking in molten fury range, but this also doesn't matter - it's just a pretty number. The important number is the total damage done over the boss encounter, and in this aspect both deep fire and arc/frost have been shown to be viable. Archimonde DPS doesn't matter - a mage's job in that encounter is to decurse and not die; DPS is what you do with your spare time once you've covered those first two tasks.

I wouldn't even give you a cracker for that comparison.

Of all the bosses to choose you choose ARCHIMONDE??? are you trying to be retarded or is it a natural state?

Archimonde is a DECURSING fight, which means your dps is redundant and your primary job is to decurse, something that fire mage did 200% better then you did.

Our first Archi kill back in September mages were told to do no damage at all and he died very cleanly so its definitely not a dps race.

If you want to draw comparisons to other mages then use fights where the comparison at least actually has some merit.


Edited to Add: Beaten....that's what I get for actually looking up how long ago it was that we had our first Archi kill.

Well, as a more constructive aside, fire suffers from many setbacks in all of Hyjal, compared to Arc/Frost.
Pretty much the only fire-friendly boss in this raid instance is Winterchill.
That being said, i feel that 40/0/21 mage - even in full t6 - should still try to make room for 2xt5 and spam ABs instead of frostbolts.